Damage-based Earthquake Engineering

Over the life of a structure, the smaller but more frequent earthquakes contribute more to the cumulative damage than the larger earthquakes on which structural design is traditionally based. This is a quantitative argument in favour of designing structures beyond what the codes require for life-safety.

This book presents a computational method to evaluate the damage sustained by a building over its lifetime in a seismic environment. The ability to estimate future damage is relevant to a pair of current trends in earthquake engineering: a growing interest for preventing damage on top of protecting the public, and development of performance-based design. The proposed method combines probabilistic principles with traditional structural analysis, which makes it readily applicable to evaluation of planned structures in an engineering office. The analytical models, computational steps and supporting data used to produce an estimate of damage are discussed, and variants of the method with different run time and accuracy are considered.

As an example of application to structural design, the book proposes a method to optimise placement of viscous dampers in buildings by minimising a life-cycle cost that includes the investment in damping and the losses due to future damage. Along with the results obtained in the course of other examples, the optimal solutions support a shift toward more resilient structures designed to mitigate structural and nonstructural damage beyond the traditional life-safety requirements.

Pierre Ghisbain is a lecturer in Civil Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An advocate of performance-based design, he teaches graduate courses on computational procedures for structural analysis and the design of resilient structures under extreme events. His research aims at integrating powerful analytical and numerical methods into the practice of Civil Engineering and is built upon a background in optimization and a strong interest in the process of structural design. Pierre holds an Engineer's degree from Ecole Centrale Paris and a PhD in Civil Engineering and Computation from MIT.